Mark Twain

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.

Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute.

Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.

I never let schooling interfere with my education.

The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of ungraceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

The greatest homage we can pay truth is to use it.

Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.

A woman is a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

In peace, as a wise man, he should make suitable preparation for war.

The only guide to man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lift human life above the level of farce and give it some of the grace of tragedy.

The one who cannot restrain their anger will wish undone, what their temper and irritation prompted them to do.

Genius Borrows nobly.

You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts – a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments.

It is a profitable Wisdom to know when we have done enough: Much time and Pains are spared, in not flattering our selves against Probabilities.